SOURCE: "On Reading Collingwood's Principles of Art," in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, Winter, 1987, pp. 239-48.

In the following essay, Grant finds that Collingwood's ideas concerning art significantly vary throughout the course of his treatise The Principles of Art.

Perhaps no work of English aesthetics in this century has been more disputed than Collingwood's Principles of Art. On one extreme it is insisted that Collingwood's chief and leading doctrine is that the work of art is something exclusively mental in nature, something whose physical and publicly accessible embodiment is aesthetically extraneous. On the other extreme, while it is granted that Collingwood believed the work of art to be something "mental," it is denied that he believed it to be something "exclusively" mental. Art, for Collingwood, it is held, is something which is "unintelligible" apart from physical and publicly accessible behavior.

The sharp divergence...